Editorial: Obama, Biden bring long-overdue action on guns

Jan. 17, 2013

President Obama signs executive orders outlining proposals to eliminate gun violence as children who wrote him letters about the Newtown, Conn., school shooting look on at the White House on Wednesday. The children are, from left: Hinna Zeejah, 8; Taejah Goode, 10; Julia Stokes, 11; and Grant Fritz, 8. / AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

Noah Pozner, 6, was one of the 20 first-graders killed in the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn. Pozner's family submitted a proposed a range of reforms to a White House task force, including federal grants for public schools to undergo security reviews and requirements that gun owners lock up weapons in their homes if the guns could be accessed by mentally ill or dangerous people. / AP Photo/Family Photo, File

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It was fitting that President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, who Wednesday unveiled new measures to curb gun violence, shared the stage with children. The latter paid a heavy price in Newtown for the nation’s weak gun laws; they pay a heavy price in the streets, in their homes, and wherever firearms are found. Protecting them is left to the adults, including politicians and policy-makers; they have been doing a miserable job of it.

Children were the starting point for the much-anticipated recommendations of a Biden-led task force charged with proposing new measures to reduce gun violence, one month after a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School. New York on Tuesday became the first state since the Newtown slaughter to declare that enough was enough, passing a range of new gun- and ammunition-control laws, along with new mental-health measures. Now it is Washington’s turn.

Familiar measures

The White House’s policy recommendations are sweeping, sensible and long overdue — just the kind of restrictions fought tooth and nail by the powerful gun lobby. The president proposes banning military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines; instituting universal background checks for buyers; better enforcement of existing-gun control measures; making funds available for local communities to hire police and develop school-safety plans; and bolstering mental health care — much of the ground covered by the just-passed New York law.

Obama announced 23 measures that don’t require congressional action, including ending limitations — call them willful blindness provisions — that impede government research and data-gathering on gun violence; and requiring federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations. The latter tack has been used by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun group to show how guns sold in states with weak gun laws show up at crime scenes in New York and other states with tough gun laws.

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Pressing lawmakers

The president devoted much of his remarks acknowledging the obvious, that it would be difficult to compel Congress to act — notwithstanding the 30,000 lives lost to gun violence in the U.S. each year — a toll projected to soon to exceed traffic deaths. The U.S. has the highest rates of firearm-related deaths — including homicide, suicide and accidents — among high-income nations. He properly called on the public to press lawmakers for answers: “Ask your member of Congress if they support universal background checks to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Ask them if they support renewing a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. And if they say no, ask them why not.”

The National Rifle Association challenged that line of inquiry, responding two hours after the president and vice president spoke. “Attacking firearms and ignoring children is not a solution to the crisis we face as a nation,” the NRA said in a statement. “Only honest, law-abiding gun owners will be affected and our children will remain vulnerable to the inevitability of more tragedy.”

Tragedy galore

It wasn’t clear to which tragedy the statement referred. In 2010, gun violence accounted for 6,570 U.S. deaths of children and young people, ages 1 to 24 years. The year before, 85 percent of all homicides for those ages 15 through 19 were firearm-related. Drs. Judith Palfrey and Sean Palfrey, writing last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, noted that gun injuries cause “twice as many deaths as cancer, 5 times as many as heart disease, and 15 times as many as infections.”

Others have sought before to shine a spotlight on gun violence and children. About two months before the Newtown slaughter, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its long-standing policy position on gun violence. It argued anew for many of the same gun-control measures gaining fresh attention in New York and Washington. It advocated for new restrictions on firearms sales and ownership; and more counseling for parents on the hazards of firearms — with reinforcement for patients with mood disorders, substance abuse problems, or a history of suicide.

It called for reduced television-viewing by children, “because media exposure results in increases in childhood and youth violence”; and for funding for research into prevention of firearm injury. The AAP, while disputing charges it is anti-gun, also affirmed this advice: “The most effective measure to prevent suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm-related injuries to children and adolescents is the absence of guns from homes and communities.”

Blogger Maria Guido, posting at Mommyish.com, wrote at the time: “They have an opinion about basically everything that goes on around our children. The American public usually follow their advice. But something tells me they won’t this time.”

Newtown swept onto the scene weeks later, putting children back on center stage. They should haunt us until the adults — and Congress — act.